Field of the Invention
This invention relates broadly to the production of print media such as magazines, books, catalogues and the like, and more specifically to the production of different issues or groups of magazines within a total national subscription of a magazine.
For the purpose of this disclosure, reference will hereinafter be made to "magazine" or "magazines" with the understanding that the term is to be considered generic to magazines, books, catalogues and the like. In magazine publishing, there is an increasing desire by advertisers to direct their advertising at particular subscriber groups within a total national subscription of a magazine. To meet this demand the magazine publisher has to provide different issues of magazines containing different combinations of advertising for different subscriber groups which accordingly requires that the magazines of one total national subscription are to be made up of different combinations of signatures.
A typical magazine assembly system for solving this problem is for example disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,819,173 which describes a method and an apparatus for producing magazines. The apparatus comprises an inserter having a plurality of pockets arranged aside a collating chain and adapted to contain different sets of signatures which are to be delivered to the collating chain. Each of the inserter pockets is provided with a feeder mechanism which may be selectively engaged or disengaged to enable or prevent the feeding of the signature from the associated pocket feed mechanism to the collating chains. This selective feeding of signatures from a plurality of hoppers makes it possible to produce different issues of magazines of one edition.
From U.S. Pat. No. 4,988,086, a collating apparatus for producing magazines is known. This document describes an apparatus for forming sheet material assemblages where a continuous path of sequentially arranged pockets travels beneath a plurality of piles of sheets, each pile being arranged in a bottomless hopper. Each of the pockets comprises a belt mechanism to extract one of the sheet materials from the piles when it passes beneath the pile and to feed it into the receiving pocket.
As the number of hoppers which can be arranged along the conveyor is limited due to the limited length of the conveyor, this heretofore known method and apparatus is considerably limited, however, in its ability to add any number of different signatures to the magazine.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,989,850 discloses a machine for collating signatures on a conveyor, where the individual magazines which are to be produced are provided with the name and address of the subscriber on the inside of a so called demographic signature. To deliver such a signature to a main conveyor it is suggested to provide the machine with a remote conveyor, a so-called raceway, which delivers individual and personalized signatures from a remote signature magazine to the main conveyor. The signatures are fed from the remote magazine to the raceway using an extracting cylinder comprising a pair of discs mounted on a common shaft. The signatures are identical in geometry and have the same preprinted text. During traveling on the raceway the signatures are personalized by an ink jet printer. Furthermore, it is possible to provide two pocket feeders for delivering different signatures onto the raceway depending on so-called demographic orders which refer to different interests of the reader, for example.